Power Solutions For Autonomous Mobile Robots

Power solutions for autonomous mobile robots: A survey
1. Introduction
The locomotion guarantees the robustness of a robot, perform missions at
multiple sites, reposition and install the machine in other work environments
with minimal changes and allows it to work in inaccessible places. This
mobility provides flexibility in robots to perform impossible tasks for humans.
Autonomous mobile robots (AMR) are useful in industry, agriculture, hospitals
and homes. They are used for planting, building, patrolling, mining, and control
of other systems. AMR are being efficient and productive due to their success
and rapid development.
2. Methodology
Most robots (other than AMR) are stationary and need continuous fuel supply.
Meanwhile the portability of AMR requires batteries, although they have
limited capacity. In the future, AMR are designed to have energy autonomy that
is cheaper and more applicable. Howerver, in present, personal AMR is very
expensive, expecially the sensors and energy setup. The energy solutions for
AMR are rarely mentioned. Therefore, this article is trying to highlight the
shortcoming about AMR energy solutions and give motivation for further
research.
3. Power solutions
3.1. Engine-powered AMR
- Gasoline-powered AMR have advantage for their quick replenishment with
exuberant fuel source. The disadadvantages of these robots are noise, pollution
and they require an operator for refuelling (fig.2 b,c). Alpha Dog in Figure 2(c),
used a gasoline-powered engine with onboard batteries to provide energy to the
electronics and even to charge handheld devices, radios and laptops. It could
travel 32 km in 24 h with a 181 kg payload before refuelling.
- Monopropellant-powered AMR are suitable for robots the require low energy.
They includes low-energy chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide and propane.
- External combustion engine-powered AMR is a combination of the free piston
Stirling engine and the linear alternator. It is used for small robots to reduce the
cost, danger and risks of the space research missions.
3.2. Fuel cell-powered AMR
- Microbial fuel cell AMR use organic waste as fuel and living microorganisms
as catalysts to produce electrical energy. Gastronome in Figure 3(a) used a
MFC to convert food into electricity to produce power to drive the robot.
- Proton exchange membrane fuel cell AMR includes Polymer electrolyte (PE)
fuel cell, solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) fuel cell and proton exchange
membrane (PEM) fuel cell, these are different names for the same type of fuel
cell that processes hydrogen to produce electricity. Figure 3(d) shows Co-walk
mobile robot that uses power supply system includes dual lithium-ion batteries
with a PEM fuel cell. It was powered by batteries meanwhile the fuel cell was
used to charge them. Experiments showed that it doubled the working time to
5.9 h.
- Solid oxide fuel cell: The efficient energy of solid fuel fuel cells is in the
range of 55%–65%, but it can be up to 85% in cogeneration case. Nevertheless,
these fuel cells has slow start-up and stoppage, they also require expensive
interconnection materials that can withstand high temperatures.
3.3. Solar-powered AMR
Sunlight is a clean source of energy that can be directly converted to electrical
energy by using photovoltaic (PV) cells.
- Agricultural robots such as Ladybird in Figure 4(b) was an autonomous
agricultural robot, it was developed for surveillance and monitoring of
agricultural fields. Figure 4(a) shows the smart farming robot was developed for
irrigation and pesticide spraying.
- Cleaning robots, The robot, shown in Figure 4(g), was intended for cleaning
roadways and had a dust collection capacity of 800 g.
- This is Exploration/detection robots, the top and sides of the robot were
covered with solar panels, as shown in Figure 4(d). It was able to drive in the
soft snow at a speed of 0.78 m/s for 5–8 h.
3.5. Other energy sources
Those energy source above are the most popular, this article continues to shows
other energy solutions for AMR, such as Battery swapping (Fig 5(a)), Energy
harvesting (Fig 5(h)) and Supercapacitors-powered AMR (Fig 5(b)).
4. Commercially available robots
Here, a few examples of such robots marketed for military, industrial and
domestic use are presented to provide an overview of the available
technologies, prospective usage, working environment and operation times.
-Throwbot®2 from Recon robotics is a military robot for audio–video
reconnaissance in indoor and outdoor environments.
- Bulldog is a tracked robot for search and rescue, surveillance, bomb disposal
and patrolling of hazardous areas.
- Thorvald-II is a commercially available autonomous wheeled robot for
agricultural applications
5. Discussion
A comparison of the characteristics of the power solutions discussed in this
work is given in Fig. 6. It is evident that the power solution selection is mostly
dictated by the task and operating environment. Alpha Dog and BigDog had
gasoline-powered engines because of their outdoor application and high
payload capacity, but their recent Spot variant, which is mostly used in indoor
environments for demonstrations, is powered by batteries. The other gasoline-
powered robots like Jinpoong, T4, Nomad and snow blower robots were also
used outdoors. (Fig 6)
6. Conclusion
Energy supply is one of the limiting factors in the expansion of mobile robots to
new domains and with the increasing number of robots, appropriate power
supply technologies can be an area of concern for future robots. As we
approach the era of industry 5.0; clean, robust and long-haul power solutions
will be required. The low operation time and high costs of currently available
solutions make them feasible for exorbitant applications.

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Power solutions for autonomous mobile robots: A survey

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